Swing Catalyst Support Center

Recommended USB 3.0 Components

Recommended components for USB 3.0 High-Speed Cameras

We strongly recommend USB 3.0 PCI Express cards for desktop systems.

Most built-in USB 3.0 controllers are not adequate for high bandwidth (high speed / high resolution) USB 3.0 cameras, and will result in dropped frames and other instabilities), this also therefor applies to many laptops.

Built in USB 3.0 controllers work but the performance is wildly varied depending on the chipset, cameras bandwidth requirements, and how many camera's used.

Actual performance between our recommendations, and camera's can also differ. Meaning, one camera from Point Grey might have better performance with a specific chipset, vs one from Ximea, or the other way around.

Compatible USB 3.0 Add-on cards (external host adapters for laptops):

Recommended Intel chipsets*:

Intel Haswell (4th generation)

Intel Broadwell (5th generation)

Intel Skylake (6th generation)

* Performance may vary.

The maximum USB 3 speed is 500MB/s, but in reality the limit is much lower than this. In many cases the actual performance is about half and in some cases worse than that. This means not all chipsets can handle multiple camera's with max framerate and resolution.

Tip: Using AOI/ROI (region of interest) can help lower the overall bandwidth usage.

For multiple camera setups, e.g two camera setup it's important each camera uses approx half of max bandwidth to able to use two cameras.

Recommended USB 3.0 Cables:

Although the USB 3.0 standard does not specify a maximum cable length, we do not recommend cables longer than 3 meters.

Some 5 meter cables work, whereas others don't depending on the manufacturer and camera. We recommend to use 3 meter cables + an active usb extension or repeater that fits the USB 3 specification.